Iraq war: burying the inconvenient past

Nine years after the Iraq war, Britain is still agonising over the invasion. The long-running Chilcott inquiry is investigating how it was that Britain's great democracy was swept along the path to an illegal war.

No stone is being left unturned: the absolutist, moralising convictions of then prime minister Tony Blair; the intelligence community that got it so terribly wrong; the hawks that ingeniously linked Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden; the currying of favour with the United States; and the tortuous legal advice – private warnings of illegal aggression (from the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith) spun into public tales that all was by the book.

The contrast to Britain's collective soul-searching could not be more stark than in Australia. Here, the Iraq war has long been forgotten. Since the withdrawal of Australian troops, there is an unspoken bipartisan agreement to bury the inconvenient past. There are no calls for an inquiry. As one Australian journalist said to me, Iraq is no longer a story.

It is strange that there is little lingering political angst about our illegal invasion of another country, or its catastrophic effects on 600,000 dead Iraqis, the United Nations and the rule of law. The ongoing violence and instability in Iraq is now regarded as their problem, not ours.

The magnificent blunders of our intelligence services have been swept aside. The shocking error of judgment of our former prime minister has been dimmed, aided by his new-found status as congenial elder statesman, showered with medals by the Queen, and the self-serving justifications in his well-selling biography.

The servile, unquestioning friendship with George Bush, which dragged our government into Iraq and saw it defend Guantanamo Bay, is just another distant chapter in our feted alliance history. The Australian government lawyers who said it was legal are also home free.

Also left unanswered is the billion dollar security question of whether invading Iraq made us safer – or made Australians a renewed target for extremists everywhere. The war also won us few friends in today's Iraq. There is also a question about the moral responsibility borne by our political leaders for putting the lives of our soldiers at risk for a phoney cause. Leaders who send our soldiers to die unnecessarily break the sacred trust of their peoples.

Perhaps it helped our invasion that Saddam Hussein had few friends. He had already gassed his enemies. He was an old school Arab tyrant, thankfully one of a dying breed after the Arab Spring. Few Iraqis mourn his passing, though many remain traumatised by the violence of an unnecessary war – and many others are dead who would have been alive under Saddam Hussein.

Political amnesia is not good for our democracy or the rule of law. Australia should follow Britain's lead in establishing a broad inquiry into Australia's invasion of Iraq. Democracies bear a special duty to uphold the international rule of law, to lead by example in a world where our best defence against security threats is to strengthen – not tear down – the multilateral system. Repressive countries are already doing enough to weaken the UN and international law.

An Australian inquiry should examine the decision-making that led us to war, including the intelligence assessments, political and strategic calculations, and legal arguments. A particular focus should be whether any Australian government officials committed the international crime of aggression – that is, waging an illegal war against peace. It may be recalled that after the Nuremberg trials, we executed Nazi war leaders for the crime of aggression.

An inquiry is also an opportunity to look forward, to improve our decision-making about future wars. For instance, when waging war is an executive prerogative as in Australia, with no role for Parliament, there is precious little to hold back a government bent on the war path. This can be our salvation when the nation is faced by a supreme emergency threatening its shores.

But in other cases it can be abused, and send us sprawling into the debris of a dirty war. Now, as the drums beat louder to attack Iran over its own nuclear ambitions, or to encircle the bogey of a more confident China, we are in danger of repeating our mistakes.

In the long sweep of history, I have no doubt that our children will scratch their heads and wonder why we attacked Iraq. They may well be puzzled about why there was no reckoning for those who took us there, and no justice for the innocent dead. I hope it gives them pause before mounting their own cavalier escapades to smash foreign governments and kill their peoples.

Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at The University of Sydney. Last month he trained Iraqi and Kurdish security forces in Iraq.View his full profile here.

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